Review: 'An Untamed State' by Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay's first novel, "An Untamed State," is a post-colonial narrative that tackles kidnapping in Haiti and its ramifications.

Roxane Gay's first novel, "An Untamed State," is a post-colonial narrative that tackles kidnapping in Haiti and its ramifications. (Jay Grabiec photo)

Amy Gentry

"There are three Haitis — the country Americans know and the country Haitians know and the country I thought I knew," says Mireille, the narrator of Roxane Gay's grueling but worthwhile first novel "An Untamed State." Kidnapped and held for ransom while visiting her wealthy parents in Haiti, Miri learns that there is more than one of her, too: both the fierce survivor, bloodied but unbowed, and the shattered woman who will never fully escape her tormentors. Gay's novel about trauma and its impact on bodies and nations is itself untamed.

It can also be somewhat traumatic. We know from the first page that Miri will survive her 13-day captivity. That knowledge becomes crucial for sustaining us through the rest of the book, in which Miri is beaten and raped repeatedly, described with visceral detail. As Miri's rich father refuses to pay the kidnappers, her treatment worsens at their hands, and Gay's prose focuses with excruciating, claustrophobic precision on the physical sensations of her abuse. At their best, these passages transcend their brutal fleshiness, and we witness Miri's psyche rocketing through stages of shock, pain, rage and numbness. Still, her final stage of near-total dissociation comes almost as a relief.

This is by design. Gay, a prolific feminist writer (she has a book of essays called "Bad Feminist" coming out this summer), has written cogently about rape culture. In 2011, in a scorching indictment of a New York Times article that seemed to assign partial blame to an 11-year-old for her own gang-rape, Gay called on journalists and novelists alike to write rape differently, finding "ways of rewriting that restore the actual violence to these crimes and that make it impossible for men to be excused from committing atrocities." As an experiment in this type of writing, the book succeeds brilliantly.

It also succeeds, more subtly, on another level. "An Untamed State" is dedicated to "women, the world over," but this crime happens in Haiti, also the subject of Gay's first short story collection, "Ayiti." As in Teju Cole's "Every Day Is for the Thief," the crime is part of the routinized violence of a nation that was itself brutalized under centuries of colonial rule and slavery. Miri's captivity narrative can be understood as a potent metaphor for that history. Reginald Delva, Haiti's own secretary of state for public security, drew a similar analogy in 2012: "Haitians can take a lot of things, even an assassination. But kidnappings remind us of slavery, and people can't handle that."

At the center of this post-colonial narrative is Miri's father, whose refusal to pay the kidnappers not only prolongs but multiplies Miri's suffering needlessly. A native Haitian who toiled in America for years before returning to his homeland to build a successful construction empire, he bears the fierce pride of a nation that was the first to shrug off colonial rule after the French Revolution. Yet in the midst of horrifying poverty, his success is under constant threat by those who didn't make it, and needs constant protecting. To pay is to show weakness.

"Your father may think he owns the city but I own these streets," says the head of the kidnapping ring, and Miri is succinct about her role in this power struggle: "It is often women who pay the price for what men want." Without excusing either of these men, Gay maps the hierarchies that shape their behavior.

Gay's gift for these intersectional subtleties is undeniable. Her writing is not always as seamless. Occasionally the prose bumps and strains, most often in describing Miri's relationship with Michael, her blond Midwestern husband. Michael is an all-American nice guy in contrast to Miri's prickly first-generation toughness, but he comes across as so doughy and naïve that it's hard to invest in the relationship. Even when Miri is spiteful or erratic, her perspective feels more trustworthy than that of a man who packs an entire suitcase full of bottled water for a visit to his wife's rich Haitian relatives.

In the aftermath of the kidnapping, Michael's inability to recognize the extent of Miri's trauma is all too realistic — rape victims often take heat for their inability to produce cogent accounts of their own trauma while still suffering from its dissociative effects. But the book sometimes seems to strain to justify his position, especially in occasional passages from his point of view that distract from Miri's narrative without making him much more sympathetic. At times, it's easier to understand Miri's father's detestable actions than her husband's stubbornness.

There has been some recent evidence that Haiti's kidnapping problem is improving in response to a 2012 UN anti-kidnapping initiative. Gay's novel stands as a reminder that for thousands of victims and their families, the damage is done. As in any story about trauma, the ending only seems happy because the worst has already happened. The body may heal in one lifetime, but hope may take longer to recover.

Amy Gentry is a writer living in Austin, Texas. She has a doctorate in English and writes a weekly style column called The Good Eye.

"An Untamed State"

By Roxane Gay, Grove, 370 pages, $16

Roxane Gay will discuss her new book at 7 p.m. at The Book Cellar, 4736-38 N. Lincoln Ave. See more details at tinyurl.com/l2v5co3